Orbis World Globes Creates 12-foot Moon Globe for Google Lunar X Prize Announcement

9/19/2007 - Orbis World Globes, a small northwest design company, producing the world’s most visually authentic giant globes, announced today that their latest creation, a 12-foot diameter Moon Globe, was the centerpiece for the Google Lunar X Prize announcement, which took place last Thursday, at the Wired NextFest in Los Angeles.

Eric Morris, the founder of Orbis and builder of globe displays for the trade show industry, said today, ‘Installing this globe in the X Prize announcement display was a proud moment for us. We are very excited to have one of our new giant Moon Globes contributing to such an amazing and important event. In our own small way, we are assisting with our return to the Moon.’

The X PRIZE Foundation and Google announced on September 13th the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a remarkable $30 million prize purse. Private companies from around the world will compete to land a privately funded robotic rover on the Moon that is capable of completing several mission objectives, including roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to the Earth.

The Google Lunar X PRIZE is an unprecedented international competition that will challenge and inspire engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. The X PRIZE Foundation, best known for the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for private suborbital spaceflight, is an educational nonprofit prize organization whose goal is to bring about radical breakthroughs to solve some of the greatest challenges facing the world today.

Utilizing the latest generation of NASA satellite imagery, Orbis World Globes produces globes and custom spheres for trade show exhibits. Orbis globes are the most visually authentic world replicas available on our planet.

In 1985, inspired by the early photographs of the whole Earth taken by the Apollo astronauts, Eric Morris founded Orbis. His goal was to bring to market photorealistic world globes and help change people’s perspective of our planet. Eric thought, ‘If everyone can see Planet Earth as the orbiting astronauts observe it, perhaps they will be similarly inspired.’

Orbis World Globes can be produced as large as desired, from 3 to 30 feet in diameter. They are perfect for permanent installations, such as corporate lobbies and museum exhibits, as well as temporary displays such as trade shows and conferences.

Orbis World Globes now makes Moon Globes, featuring NASA satellite imagery, and custom spheres of all kinds.

For more information, go to www.earthball.com.



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